October 10, 2005

Tales From The Crib

No pajamas for you? Start thinking again

Jennifer Margulis

If you’re a woman and you’re reading this column after you just had a baby, you’re still in your pajamas. It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and the baby is napping. If you’re not in your pajamas, maybe you’ve managed, barely, to take a shower and get dressed and, perhaps, make the bed. Your cognitive self doesn’t think showering and putting on clothes are feats to celebrate but the rest of you is feeling very successful.

If you’ve never had a baby (though perhaps you plan to or are even pregnant), and you’re leafing through the paper sipping a strong cup of coffee, you’re scoffing at the paragraph above. You can’t imagine a day, and you don’t believe it will ever come, when getting dressed could actually feel like an accomplishment — for anyone. You are an energetic, determined, talented person. The doffing of sleepwear and donning of clothing is something you do every morning. Even if you’re pregnant, now, and not feeling well, you still have plenty of time to get dressed.

That will change.

If you’re planning to have a baby, be it next week or in 10 years, everything in your life will change. And many well-meaning strangers will annoy the bejeezus out of you by telling you as much with a knowing smile on their faces while patting your protrusion. You’ll try not to cringe from their breath, which smells to your pregnant nose like rotting meat, and you’ll have no idea what they’re talking about.

Amid the baby showers, congratulatory cards, visits from family and friends, photographs (you’ll spend more money developing photos than buying groceries), presents, hand-me-downs and all the other excitement, after you have a baby your life will be so altered that you won’t recognize it, or yourself. That’s OK — you’ll have the rest of your life to learn.

The problem is there’s an entire industry of doctors, nurses, mothers, childbirth instructors, drug companies, government agencies and newspaper columnists who are helping to keep you from knowing what you really need to know. Next time you go into a bookstore, look at all the books on the shelves around you. Most of them boast smiling pregnant women and adorable little children. None of them show screaming babies and bleary-eyed, pajama-wearing parents. But the truth is often pretty far from those images. During my first pregnancy, I was sick for 6 1/2 months. After the three-month mark, I expected the feeling that I needed to be peeled off the floor with a spatula to go away. It didn’t. I awoke every morning (feeling fine), showered, got dressed (those were the days), ate breakfast, cried and went back to bed. In the eighth and ninth months of my pregnancy, ironically, I was cycling nine miles a day in a jog bra and bicycle shorts. I’m no wimp. But pregnancy floored me.

Since most people in the industry try to present pregnancy and child-rearing in an positive way, they fail to tell pregnant couples — and new parents — about the hazards they may face. How cruel is this? If you are feeling fine, you skip over the sections in the books about the ill effects of being pregnant. But if you’re five months pregnant and still vomiting, you look for validation of your condition. You find none. Finding no validation of your condition makes you wonder what is wrong with you.

Then there’s the other extreme. People who warn you that once you become a parent you will never do (fill in the blank here with the thing you love the most) again, you’ll lose all your friends and you’ll have no time for anything.

Just because you’re still in your pajamas today doesn’t mean you’ll be in your pajamas tomorrow. If having children teaches us anything it is to embrace change. And to buy nice pajamas.

Jennifer Margulis is the editor of a book about toddlers (”Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love”) and the author of a book about babies (”Why Babies Do That”). She lives in Ashland and owns two pairs of matching pajamas.